A tribute to Faizel Lagan – why I’m covering Hallelujah by Leonard Cohen A few years ago a close family friend, Feizal ‘Mike’ Lagan, asked me to play this Leonard Cohen song at his funeral. Naturally I said of course I would, not expecting to be called on for a long time. Unfortunately, Feizal passed
I’m delighted to have been included in The Bert Jansch Foundation’s Around the World in 80 Plays. I chose to cover one of Bert Jansch’s songs for it – Dreams of Love. If you’re not familiar with the project, Around the World in 80 Plays is sending a special guitar similar to Bert’s all over
Whether you’re a musician looking to make it big and need a cheap way to get audio and video recordings of yourself out there, a music tech student playing around with different recording methods for your latest project, or someone just looking to mess around with an instrument at home, knowing how to create professional
Here’s an original song! It’s one of those that pretty much just fell into place quite quickly. It’s a song with a story, too, which you can read more about below… It goes back to 2012 when I’d just started seeing someone new. Around the same time, one of my favourite artists was in town
I can’t remember the number of times I’ve sat down in the past with a line in my head that I thought would work well for a song and just started writing. I’ve inevitably hit the proverbial (and yet somehow very real and often visited) wall of solid brick. This was because I didn’t really
Ever been writing and find yourself frozen with indecision? It’s easily done. But writer’s block is also easily avoided. For one thing, it’s important just to let your writing flow. But before that, it’s important to plan your song. I like to brainstorm ideas and draw a mind map of words, phrases and their associations. The
Practise forms habits. So practise right! Practise letting your writing flow, then coming back and editing. Practise finishing songs. This is one of the main areas I’m working on – I’ve spent years writing bits of songs and thinking I’ll come back to it later. Sometimes I do, but unfortunately that has distilled this routine of incompleteness in
It’s highly likely that a good 90% of what you produce won’t be up to scratch. That’s true whether you write one song or one hundred. This is just the way it is, it’s the creative process in a nutshell and it’s important to accept that. This is why it’s useful to try and produce lots of material.
I’ve always thought that what sets individuals out as particularly good aside from talent (and the honing of it) is taste. Taste is really the only thing that dictates the creative choices we make, whether in the songwriting process or in production. Sure there may be some commercial awareness there that sets certain requirements. Maybe an
